103309-is-merging-servers-really-a-bad-thing
Content ---- ---- ---- Around 2 months, but the game has to many servers and to high caps for servers, there are some terrible servers at the minute that could benefit, although i should not of said all servers should be merged, only the lowest ones, i mean its possible im not seeing anyone due to phasing | |} ---- In theory all they would need to do is reduce the cap so that meduim and full are displayed more readily. Most of these threads wouldn't even be made. I have question though. Why is the word "low" on a server a bad thing without actually knowing the number of players on at that time or even subbed? | |} ---- I'm sorry for your loss. You have my deepest sympathy. | |} ---- Especially in a game that uses so much server sharding. You could be in the open world and never notice the difference between high and low because of how shards are set up. | |} ---- The status "low" doesnt bug me, i know the caps are high, also i did make a thread on reducing the insanely high server cap, but i was shot down and basically called an idiot a number of times | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- We have a winner. | |} ---- I would gladly pay to switch from exile to Dom as I know many other exiles would. Allow this and there would be no need to merge servers | |} ---- ---- Economy. Throw in a cross-server auction house, exchange, and CREDD market, and ... you're basically on a megaserver instead of distinct servers (which IMHO is a better design, if you're going to instance world zones anyway). | |} ---- I think they should do what Blizzard and Square have done: Make WildStar a game millions want to pay to play. | |} ---- ---- Why? I mean it. Why? If they can make enough money to fund the game at a healthy level by targeting a niche in the market (eg. "hardcore players"), and by doing so they reduce competition because other companies are not targeting that niche, why is that worse for you? (Also: what Square game do you mean?) Edited July 29, 2014 by dfjdejulio | |} ---- If their intention is to be Niche why are we debating server merges? They should go ahead and do them. There isn't going to be a huge influx of players. People left this game because of it's inaccessible nature. Not because the game is too easy. This Square game: http://xivsoul.com/ :D I can't believe it either lol. But there's literally people on top of people in every zone I've been in and I'm still leveling. I'm getting instant Dungeon Queues at level 26. P.S. That Square game is also, SUBSCRIPTION. | |} ---- ---- You should see rowsdower. Maybe 15 people in the trade area of thayd at any given time during peak hours. We desperately need a merge. | |} ---- Server mergers is admitting failure. No new players want to start playing a game that's officially failed. Look at WoW. Top of the heap and even they steadfastly refused to merge servers. They were more concerned with saving face than the happiness of their customers. They only started to do something about their absolutely dead servers when they could come up with some technical mess that they could officially call 'not a merger.' Realms are now 'linked.' "Nothing wrong here. Big numbers. Move along. Nothing to see here. Game's fine." | |} ---- Keep in mind, a lot of players are out in the world, you know, playing. And a lot of players are on their skymap where they can do almost everything the city offers, but the AH and costume changes. Not saying there aren't "dead" realms. Just saying they might not be as dead as you think. By the way, I play on Avatus, which seems to be alive and well, and at times, even peak times, the AH might dwindle. I mean, after all, peak times are play times. | |} ---- To be fair, at launch, you would NOT have called FFXIV a game millions would want to play. That game was so horrific they had to completely redesign it. That game has actually been around, technically, for four years. Only recently has it been any good. And Wildstar doesn't have Final Fantasy's name recognition. Wildstar's going to be just fine at that kind of time scale. Using FFXIV as a model, Wildstar is WAY better than the piece of shit that game was at launch. | |} ---- Because if there is one server with constant medium and everything else is low then every new player will go to the medium server and the others will slowly die out... | |} ---- ---- ---- The point of my comment is Blizz and Square Flagship MMORPGs share a very similar formula and it's working. The template for grand success couldn't be more obvious whether a certain crowd likes it or not. | |} ---- ---- I beg to differ. FFXI was the flagship MMORPG and makes the grind here look like a joke. Blizz actually started with a lot more gates on the exact same kind of content, and in fact started to "lose" (in reality just cycle through) more subs once that was no longer their M.O. FFXIV, if you held it to Wildstar's standard, would have been dead in its first few months. SE didn't make an otherwise decent game on a bad formula, FFXIV 1.0 was a bad game. A badly made, horribly designed game. If anything, I'd say Wildstar is really only more "grindy" than current WoW overall. In FFXI, you need a full group of five to even bother leveling. In FFXIV, everything, from your gathering professions to your crafting professions to your classes, can all be picked up on the same character and all grinded up. In fact, that's how you get things like soulstones that give you group dynamic abilities. But the quests don't reset, they just give you an XP buff depending on the difference between your highest and lowest levels. The only answer is to literally grind all these different jobs one at a time, by running around picking at instanced ores in given areas, or by crafting things on your crafting log one by one, or by grinding FATE quests. I mean, if you want to compare it to WoW nowadays, WoW now definitely has less gates. And I've played all these games; they're not bad games. But they're not really the ones I'd bring up to poo-poo Wildstar. Hell, I think Wildstar is better than FFXIV right now (I cancelled my WoW and FFXIV subs on the same day to focus completely on Wildstar) and Wildstar's only been out for two months. I can only imagine how good it's going to be in a few months, let alone three years worth of content drops. | |} ---- ---- ---- No No you didn't. No one cancels their WoW sub cause it's annoying to have to resub again, and we all know you will. If you were going to really quit WoW you would have done that in Cata like a lot of people did. Mists was a very good expansion even for panda haters. ( who hates pandas though seriously. ) Blizzard is taking their game into the next wave of MMO players we all knew this was going to happen. Easy as hell content is there for the casuals, Hard content is there for the more dedicated. I've been on both sides of the fence with causal and hardcore and I can tell you the ones that *cupcake* and moan about WoW's too easy free epix now haven't done any hardcore raiding or high end rated arenas ever in their life and really are just a casual scrub nub looking to be cool..News flash you're not. Carbine should have known better on a number of things. It's not like the market has made this dramatic change out of know where in the last 5 years. The game is solid it's buggy but they will get sorted. The servers are quiet from time to time but I think carbine knew this would happen. They sold this game as for the "hardcore" but in reality that was never going to work without the casual and or lazy crowd buying the game buying credd..Carbine can't survive with just a niche group of players ( Hardcore ) It just doesn't seem likely. This is my opinion and only based of my own experiences. On topic Server merges would not be in the best interest of carbine right at this moment, there are a lot of people on the fence already. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- love it, love everything about this. | |} ---- I am not sure why you keep referring to FFXIV. FFXIV and FFXIV: ARR are two different games. They shutdown FFXIV for a reason. I mean it's a different name, different director and development team even went through an alpha and beta stage. Now FFXI was pre-WoW and it actually did very well I think at once point it had about 500k subs which was pretty good for a game that stood on the verge of being themepark and sandbox and was released back in 2002. I realized (why I didn't respond to your other post) that you constantly bring up your experience and not facts. You say Wildstar is better than FFXI and WoW but you know the facts state that FFXIV:ARR and WoW are performing much better in terms of sales and player retention. We don't know how much subs WS have but we probably will find out in August. I am pretty sure WS doesn't have as many active subs as FFXIV: ARR which last I checked had 2 million subs, I even doubt there's 500k or more subs in WS today. But the jury is still out for WS. However, since we don't have official numbers we can look at things such as xfire and realize that the trend for wildstar is in a decline where as the trends for FFXIV: ARR and WoW are steady. Not to mention there hasn't been a new server launched since launch which also indicates that the game is not growing. | |} ---- Low pop servers are low pop. No amount of excuses or explanations will make them work as high pop. One of my chars is on a dead server. As in, at primetime I see max 5 people in the capital. Auction house is almost dead - very few offerings, and prices are insane as a result, because it's pretty much 1-3 guys doing the selling, especially in high level brackets. I know, because when I list high-end leather items, mine are the only items being sold, there's no competition, and even almost at-cost, nothing sells because there's nobody there. When you're out in the world, no matter what level zone, and you ask for people for 3+ man quests, you get crickets. You ask if anyone is there at all, you get crickets. You run through quest hubs, and you see nobody, execept maybe 1-2 enemies (since Exiles outnumber Dominion, which is where I am). And that's it. If you go to capital at primetime and ask if anyone is running anything, be that BGs or arenas or dungeons, you once again get only crickets. The guilds I used to belong to have all long quit (pretty much at the end of 1st month). Circles are empty, with last log-ins being 7-10 days ago. No amount of excuses or explanations will fix this issue. And my char being close to 50, I'm sorry, but I'm NOT re-rolling on another server. I'm also NOT paying extra to transfer all my chars to more populated servers, I will NOT pay extra for their incompetence. So instead, a week from now, I'm leaving the game. Not because I want to, not because there's some other game I'd rather play, but simply because current server's non-existent population makes it impossible for me to do anything. No server merges = one less subscriber, at least in my case. EDIT: The feeling I get from the server I was unfortunate enough to have most of my chars on is the same feeling I got when Age of Conan population collapsed. One day, you could go to Old Tarantia AH and see a ton of people. Lots of ganking going on in Keshatta, etc. A few weeks later, you go to the AH at primetime, and see 3 people there. And Keshatta is empty, except for a half dozen players (same ones) ganking each other. Eventually (WAY down the road) FunCom had to admit defeat and merge servers. I'm seeing the EXACT same thing happen here. Heck, even WoW had dead servers from time to time. It's not even a reflection of the game itself, because many other servers were fine, and even though population was starting to decline, the game still had near 9 mil subscribers back then worldwide. But some servers went dead - finding raids, arena teams, etc., was pretty much impossible, server economy was totally shot too. You could run BGs, because they were cross-server by then, but that's about it. But hey, if Carbine think everything is fine, then fine. We'll just agree to disagree. I'll take my money elsewhere (already canceled over the weekend, actually) and they can keep their empty server and label it as high pop for all I care. | |} ---- Yes, yes I did. :lol: Believe me, it was weird doing it because my sub hasn't been inactive since launch, but I cancelled because I don't plan to go back. No point in shelling out subscription money to keep a game active that I'm not playing. It is strange seeing my authenticator fob and knowing I won't ever need it again. I am still planning on getting an Alliance Lion's Head tattoo on my arm, though. I may not be playing, but it was ten years of good times. Almost feels like a chapter of life ending. To your more relevant point, Wildstar can survive on a niche group of players if it has to. Hell, FFXI and EVE Online have been doing it for a decade and both have always remained profitable. There are two important questions to answer before that can be judged, though: 1. How many players does Wildstar NEED to remain viable? This doesn't have to be much if they covered the cost of production in box and CREDD sales (I think they did). If so, they need to pay developer salaries and the light bills. That doesn't really take much, usually, especially for a division of Carbine's size. 2. Will NCSoft care if they have enough for number 1? That's the more important question. Unfortunately, Carbine doesn't get to just worry about themselves, they have to pay the "rent" to NCSoft. Wildstar could remain perfectly profitable, even have a few million subs and be, in the eyes of anyone else, incredibly successful, and NCSoft could still force changes. They're aware of the kind of money SWTOR makes post-F2P, and they don't have a reputation for organic, home-grown game design decisions. They're a sort of soulless money vacuum. But I imagine Wildstar needs just a few hundred thousand subs to survive indefinitely, and that ought to take them through until they've added more content. I don't imagine they'll be wildly successful off the bat (I'd be absolutely shocked if they were at over 500k after the WoD drop) because their IP is an unknown and they have to make a name for themselves to get more than the experimental crowd regularly. But if they can fend off the NCSoft sharks, fix their issues, and keep plugging away with content, I wouldn't be shocked if they hit a million subs within a year. EDIT: My brain is having trouble processing | |} ---- No, the big picture here is to merge some of the dead servers They arent going to have any players to fix bugs for if they dont do something about the sinking servers and ASAP. One of the reasons why ppl are quitting is for that very reason!, they dont see many other players on their server which is quite discouraging and results in more ppl quitting. They NEED to do something about the servers before anything so people are actually happy seeing other players on their server. I know I play on 3 different servers, Rowsdower being the primary server and Ive responded in countless threads about the server being deader then dead, as in EXTREMELY dead. I havent logged in in 3 weeks because of how dead it is. Its like a switch flipped. I used to see ppl and the next day it was like a night an day difference. The server just died and continues to die. Carbine, if you want to salvage any playerbase that you have left, you better do something to counter this server population issue that IS currently going on in your game. And for all those ppl who are in denial and continue to defend that the servers are fine, you need to wake up and pull your head out of your ass and open your eyes. Servers are hurting severely. With WoWs expansion on the horizon, thats going to drive the population down, and you have Archeage which will also drop the population down as well which at that point, there probably will be a select few on some servers. | |} ---- I bring it up because it's definitely relevant when you're trying to use FFXIV as a model against Wildstar. Like it or not, I agree with you, SquareEnix LITERALLY had to redesign the game because their initial output was a colossal failure on almost every level, and that's a very widely held and common opinion (not just mine). You can say, "Well, it relaunched, it's a different game, it doesn't apply," but it does. FFXIV:ARR is a success only because SquareEnix was ready to ride out a monumental failure, even if they had to rebuild from almost nothing. Wildstar launched about two months ago, and no matter what your opinion, they haven't screwed up NEARLY as bad as SE did. If SE can salvage a good MMORPG out of that garbage, Wildstar ought to be just fine. They won't have to redesign everything in their game in three years, Wildstar is a great game now. That's the whole point I'm making here. Wildstar isn't in that bad of shape (games have come back from a LOT worse). I would agree it's not bigger than FFXIV:ARR yet because, let's face it, Final Fantasy is a known commodity and ARR has been a solid product for almost a year in and of itself. It didn't take off directly from its re-launch, it's had to fight for subs by convincing people that it's not the old FFXIV anymore. Thus do I think Wildstar is going to work pretty well given time. As long as it's given a chance. Of course, SE, CCP, and Blizzard didn't have NCSoft looking over their shoulder with a knife. | |} ---- FFXI and EvE were games that were developed over a decade ago. So their costs of still doing business is lower especially when you add in the rising costs of inflation which includes the rising costs to develop games. It's like buying a commercial property back in the 90s. The cost of the property will be cheap compared to today's commercial property prices and in some cases taxes. It certainly gives you a huge advantage on how much income you need to generate to remain a profit, it won't be much when you compare it to a competitor who just recently purchased his commercial property. Also I HIGHLY doubt wildstar could server off of a few hundred subs. I mean if that were the case the simple fact of 40 man wouldn't survive unless all players were on one server but then again still think it would be hard to get 40 men. Not to mention I am pretty sure these semi-mega servers costs quite a bit to maintain. | |} ---- ---- SE has huge pockets they were able to afford to scrap the project and re-do it. If WS turns out like FFXIV the original Carbine will not have the means to scrap everything and re-do it. Also to say WS is a great game now is once again your opinion. The problem is your opinion nor does mine pay the bills. The truth is the latest trend for WS using xfire which is the only measure we can use atm is that it's on a downward decline the simple fact that no servers have opened up also is another trend saying it's not growing. Name a game that has come back from a lot worst? What SWTOR? We don't even know how well that is doing. Sure it has 2 million users but many could be playing literally for free. They never released how much profit SWTOR was generating and how much more it has generated since going F2P. | |} ---- Hundred thousand, I'm sorry. I'm still trying to wake up. Modified the original post. Definitely not a few hundred; I don't think 3000 dollars would cover their annual electric bill, never mind the raiding population. I will say that FFXI and EVE weren't cheap games when they were made, even being made back in the day. It doesn't really take that many subscriptions to remain viable. I can't imagine FFXI (inflation counted) would cost that much less than Wildstar did; it was pretty intense graphically and operationally in its time. It depends a lot on what they've got running at their home base, though. Keeping servers running isn't really that expensive. The money's in the labor for maintenance. I'm not saying they should or shouldn't merge servers as long as they don't merge Evindra (because I want my RP server, but sharding makes the other servers good candidates for a kind of superserver; which may, in the end, be cheaper because you don't have to run all the hardware all at once despite population). I'm just saying that they've probably got a lot of time and breathing room before they die by attrition, and a huge upside. One of the reasons they may not be merging servers is that they foresee an eventual population boom. I'm not one to say they should bank on that. I hardly think they're going to get a million-sub explosion until sometime next year, if ever. | |} ---- Agreed with this. S-E also had an already-successful MMO FFXI feeding them in money, and part of the reason they redid FFXIV is that they failed to draw their base from FFXI into FFXIV with the first incarnation, and they knew that they really wanted to get their loyal subscriber base over into FFXIV. Carbine doesn't have anywhere near the financial resources or power that S-E does. FFXIV's release also didn't coincide with a major WoW expansion release either, which is honestly the biggest threat Wildstar faces with now. Fighting against WoW during the start/middle of an expansion cycle is very hard for budding MMOs, even now. So really, Wildstar's major deadline to get things together is before WoD drops. It's going to be really ugly if they don't, sadly. | |} ---- A screenshot from ... what? 3AM Tuesday morning? :lol: | |} ---- ---- Actually, they did a few times. Here's one of the first google links showing their profit doubled after going F2P. Also, I wouldn't trust Xfire numbers because, let's face it, at this point there isn't much that's reliable. According to Xfire, I'm not playing, for example, nor is anyone else I know (most of my old WoW buddies couldn't give a damn about tournament software). I will say it's almost assured that they've dropped to some degree, I'll agree with that. Every MMORPG starts with a massive boom in population then loses members to some degree for the next few months; not every game is for everyone. MMORPG business models are a long game, you can't get money on short-term reactions and results. | |} ---- I'm right here with you buddy, I don't want them to merge Evindra either, but if the population stagnates or drops (especially for Dominion) it may be necessary. I think ours is one of the worst servers in terms of population imbalance (blame the faction system, really...) GW2 recently did their megaserver thing and you do see people RPing all about and the non-RPers just kind of don't pay them any mind as usual, so I don't think a megaserver thing would hurt too much. | |} ---- A few minutes before I posted. | |} ---- You know, ironically, I don't think we have that big of a problem on Evindra, of anyone. RPers have moved mostly into housing especially, but I was crafting at midnight last night in a packed Academy Corner. We routinely go medium (which is funny, because we were medium when everyone else was high) and we're only really low during non-peak hours. I think we're lower in pop than at launch, maybe, but we haven't fluctuated quite so much as some of the other servers. Some started peaking high during launch and don't have more than we do now. That's a pretty significant drop for them, especially since they don't have RP to keep them in the game. No reason to not combine all the other servers into a megaserver, though, no matter the subs. EVE has 500k active subs, and only maybe 45k on at peak times at one time. So even if Wildstar has 500k people, it does no good for server populations if they're not logged in daily and playing the game. | |} ---- So 9am-ish? | |} ---- Yeah, though if you watch it throughout the day it stays almost exclusively low until 7PM~ EST when 2 or 3 servers eventually bounce to medium. | |} ---- ---- I guess that joke would make sense if Palestine was actually a country and not already plopped in the middle of Israel. | |} ---- Definitely agreed and honestly I have found that RPers in general tend to be more dedicated to games in the long run than most players (because you have good server communities and an additional "thing" to do: roleplay) and so I'm pretty optimistic about Evindra in the long term. I also think the factions will even out a little more in the long run as well. Right now Dominion is struggling a little because they lack the large Exile population, and like you said RPers are increasingly withdrawing into housing which make the faction look empty a lot of the time. But if you check out our realm forums already there are people trying the other side of the pond, which I think will continue into the future. But yeah ultimately I think the RP servers are going to be some of the most consistent servers over the game's lifespan too. They can't really merge Evindra and Lightspire because... well, that's a whole separate set of issues. | |} ---- That seems a bit more close to true. However, comparing any MMO since WoWs dominant arrival to WoW is foolish and unrealistic. | |} ---- There has been a drop-off of concurrent players. 2 weeks ago all servers but Myrcalus and Rowsdower were at Medium in the evening. Only Stormtalon, Evindra and Pergo were at Medium on the evening of 7/29. Even so, there's really no point in showing servers at 9am EST to get a feel for the populations. Even when servers were hitting High in the evening, they were still Low at 9am. | |} ---- ---- Or turn on an option, like they had in GW1, to switch shards easily to go to the populated areas with players in them | |} ---- ---- Well no FFXI and EvE were cheaper back in the day. They were released in 2002 which means development taken places a few years prior so perhaps late 90s. In fact according to FFXI wiki it cost $17- $25 million and the game needed 200,000 subscribers to break even and start making a small profit. WS estimated budget was around 50-75 million. Which is more than double or triple the price of FFXI which could mean it will need between 350k-500k at the minimum to break even and draw in a profit. | |} ---- SE claimed a few months ago that there were over 2 million subscribers. | |} ---- Yes, we now their profits double but the question is how much were they making in the beginning? We use Xfire because there is no other alternative. Just like when economist use forecasts, they're always wrong but there no other alternative to collect the data. But generally their trends are right. | |} ---- Games were also cheaper to buy back then and subs were normally $10 a month vs the $15 model nowadays. It's all relative to the market and costs. | |} ---- Which is my point. Games were cheaper back then because inflation was much lower back then. today everything costs more to produce or consume thanks to inflation. I remember the first XCOM for PSX game released back in 1994 cost below $200k to produce. | |} ---- It's been a very long time since I've been in GW1, but I recall loosely it mgiht be similar to how TERA handled it's shards. You could actually pick to be in a crowded shard(usually shard 1), a medium, or a low shard that had been created. I remember a few times logging on and going "damn this server is dead and when i and others decided to change to the same shard(shard 1, unless it was full and then we went to shard 2) was much more active. I can see that working well if it was similar to that.(again it's been a very long time since GW1) | |} ---- The point I am making with this though is that it is all relative. yes games were cheaper to make back then but the return on investment from players buying and subbing was also lower. So It very easily could have been relative in the aspect of what it took to turn a profit. Yes WS was more to make but so is the amount to buy the game and to sub to it. | |} ---- I would agree, except how do you handle players with the same name? From a technical standpoint it isn't hard at all until you have to consider duplicate names. Do you just "reset" all names and let it be first come first serve? That would annoy a lot of folks. This is probably the biggest hang up IMO, there's really no good way to handle it. | |} ---- The average gamer is 30+ so that makes a lot of sense that most people wouldn't be playing during work hours. I'm not saying that population isn't a problem, just that your particular evidence isn't sound. | |} ---- there are a few things they could do. 1. They could go back to the name reservation (as shoddy as it was) and if two people have the same name, see who registered it first, if at all and give it to them. If neither did then whoever created their character first. 2. Force renames for everyone with the same name and if you get the same name, great, if not just rename. I have tons of names I use so I wouldn't be mad about it 3. Allow both players to choose a number 1 through 10 and give it to the closest Just a few off the top | |} ---- From what i can remember EQ and UO sub fee were also $15, same for EvE. I don't know an MMO that had a sub fee below $15. I think FFXI may have had it at $12.99 though. Now the amount the buy the games were a little higher from FFXI to WS stand point like $10 (maybe $20) more. However, it'll still take about 350k or more subs for WS to make a profit. | |} ---- When I first subbed to EQ back in 2001 the sub fee was something around $9. There was a huge outcry when more games started coming out with higher sub fees. I remember the drama! | |} ---- ---- Other MMOs beg to differ: http://eve-offline.net/ (That dip is server downtime) | |} ---- The problem with it is that it's a fairly inaccurate metric. I mean, I'm not discounting it, but all it's done is confirm that a lot of people started playing it, then they experienced a downturn. That was predicted without any other kind of survey before release; it's why Carbine didn't want to open new servers in the first place. It's just a question of how many accounts didn't renew after the free period ended. That number was going to settle low. It's just a question of how low and whether it stays there. P.S. If you trust the article, SWTOR made $139 million last year in revenue. So that's before overhead and costs of business are deducted. EVE's got one total server for all regions handling all traffic. They don't have downtime because the EU population goes to sleep and the US population picks up. They have region locking in Wildstar to keep latencies low. I know how that works, I was mercifully working when CCP botched their last major event before I left, leading a few thousand highseccers straight into a nullsec ambush and giving up. | |} ---- True, though you aren't taking into account CREDD sales for Wildstar. As far as development goes, they could very easily already have made that back with boxes+buying CREDD. If you have a box and sold a CREDD on the CX, you dropped eighty dollars, making you worth about 5-6 subscribers for a month without ever renewing. It's why WoW makes such huge profit jumps at every expansion, them boxes pay for development, usually. I forget what my box of FFXI cost me at the time. Do you remember? | |} ---- ---- ----